The brown huntsman spider (Heteropoda jugulans) may be the fastest spider on the planet. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
Scientists from the UK and Germany analysed more than 250 spider species and found the brown huntsman to be the fastest. It reached a peak speed of 3.59 metres per second (13 km/h or 8 mph), more than double the speed of the previous record-holder, the Moroccan flic-flac spider (1.7 m/s).
The researchers collected 162 different spider species – mostly from around London and the German city of Greifswald, but also from North America, southern Europe and Australia – and measured their running speeds using cameras and gridded paper. The study has been submitted to a scientific journal.
They also included research supervised by Dr Christofer Clemente, an evolutionary biomechanist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. Clemente's original study was published in 2021 and aimed to understand spiders' unique locomotion. He said he simply grabbed the easiest spiders to find.
"These were just spiders I found in the back yard. I could just go out with my head torch and see them on the grass," Clemente said. "I am interested in how different animals of different sizes move and whether muscle might limit the speed at which animals can run. Spiders don't move using just muscle – they use a combination of muscles to retract their limbs and hydraulic pressure to push them outwards. That's a completely different way of powering locomotion to other animals."
The brown huntsman only lives along Australia's east coast and is a common sight in homes in south-east Queensland. They are about the size of a hand and while venomous, they very rarely bite humans, and when they do, the effects are mild.
The 3.59 m/s speed was only reached for a fraction of a second. The huntsman's average sustained speed was closer to 2 m/s. Clemente noted that in the animal kingdom, there appears to be a "sweet spot" between having legs and muscles that are long but not too massive. He suspects huntsmans "might be close to the sweet spot" for the best spider body type for speed.
Dr Jonas Wolff of the University of Greifswald, one of the lead authors, said this was the broadest comparative study of running speed in spiders ever conducted. Running speed determines how spiders interact with the environment, how far they disperse, and "which ecological niche they occupy."
One key finding was that "it was not the largest species that ran the fastest" and that web-building spiders were not necessarily slower than hunters like the huntsman. "Instead, the data indicates there is a threshold in body mass, after which running speed drops due to mechanical constraints in muscle physiology and the spider's body plan."
So is the brown huntsman the fastest spider in the world? Wolff said: "I would not rule out there are faster huntsman species than this one out there, which have not been tested yet."